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…there was suddenly no electricity available to us? At all. Anymore.

I’ve always maintained that it is devastatingly perilous how dependent we are on electricity, something that in the context of the history of humanity is quite new. Yet, as I’m sure you can easily notice, our modern life depends on it. I don’t know, if you’ve ever read The Stand, you’ve assuredly pondered this, too. I would contend that people got along for quite some time without it, and yet in this particular time frame we live in, we quite seem to take it for granted.

So when one is searching for meaning and value to their life/career, in that “what am I good at?” kind of way, I often point to this as one of the methods for trying to figure it out. What skill, talent, knack, proclivity (whatever you want to call it), do you have to offer that would be considered valuable, to at least someone, if there were no electricity? It is there that you will find the true value you have to society, and the true source of your income.

I think electricity has gone from being a great helper, to a great enabler, and further has become abused in the sense that it often supplants the need for humans to be intrinsically valuable to each other. Which, I think, is one of society’s fundamental building blocks.

On the flip side, I have some friends that, for this very reason it seems, refuse to use what electricity provides us as means to communicate and maintain human connection. For you see, I am part of the split generation. One foot in the last century, one in the new. We remember dial phones, tube TV’s with no remotes, and life before microwaves and VCR’s. And we marveled at how archaic the technological world of our parents was, and embraced these new things, like Atari 2600 and the first personal computers, and said, “Mom and Dad, get with it! This is the 80’s!” And yet, some of us think texting and instant messaging is way too impersonal, and a message board is the place to be on ‘the net.’

If you are 20ish though, you can’t really fathom life without texting, and myspace is already just for kids and newbies. If you aren’t editing your blog on your iPhone while driving in a GPS-directed vehicle listening to your iPod on your way to Starbucks to edit digital photographs on your MacBook Pro and upload them to the internet through their free (and often crappy) wireless, while you receive a text message while your on your iPhone with someone you’ve never met before but have seen on video iChat…..

You get the idea. San Francisco is a young, tech-savvy town. At the Smashing Pumpkins concert I was at, a large percentage of the crowd had iPhones, and everybody was texting during the whole show, taking pictures with their phone’s camera, or filming video clips for YouTube with their compact digital cameras. Even my split-gen friends and I were talking to each other through texting, even though we were standing less than 20 feet away from each other. Better than yelling in each other’s ears, you know? That’s what we had to do at concerts in the ‘old days.’

Electricity is fun. Of course, people should still be fun without it though. Otherwise, we will have a problem. Base your life and societal value on not needing it, and you might find your most appreciable skill. Refuse to use it to allow those skills to flourish, and you will be left, well, probably alone.

And to all the 20′ish-and-youngers who are enjoying these modern methods of communication: don’t forget to thank the nerdy split-gen engineers who are designing it. Their just fulfilling the Manifest Density of growing up before it existed and watching the Jetsons on Saturday mornings.